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NY Times’ Joe Nocera writes on NLRB v Boeing.
… In April, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, accusing it of opening the South Carolina plant to retaliate against the union, which has a history of striking at contract time. The N.L.R.B.’s proposed solution, believe it or not, is to move all the Dreamliner production back to Puget Sound, leaving those 5,000 workers in South Carolina twiddling their thumbs.
Seriously, when has a government agency ever tried to dictate where a company makes its products? I can’t ever remember it happening. Neither can Boeing, which is fighting the complaint. J. Michael Luttig, Boeing’s general counsel, has described the action as “unprecedented.” He has also said that it was a disservice to a country that is “in desperate need of economic growth and the concomitant job creation.” He’s right.
That’s also why I’ve become mildly obsessed with the Boeing affair. Nothing matters more right now than job creation. Last week, President Obama barnstormed the Midwest, promising a jobs package in September and blaming Republicans for blocking job-creation efforts. Republicans, of course, have blamed the administration, complaining that regulatory overkill is keeping companies from creating jobs.
They’re both right. Republicans won’t pass anything that might stimulate job growth because they are so ideologically opposed to federal spending. But the Democrats have blind spots, too. No, the Environmental Protection Agency shouldn’t be rolling back its rules, as the Republican presidential candidates seem to want. But a fair-minded person would have to acknowledge that the N.L.R.B.’s action is exactly the kind of overreach that should embarrass Democrats who claim to care about job creation. It’s paralyzing, is what it is. …
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review with a good Op-Ed on the foolish policies coming from the administration.
… First, by the government’s own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years.
In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America’s medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother’s recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow.
Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent. …
…In its first 26 months, reports The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., federal regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will add some $9.5 billion in new costs.
Bottom line: What’s required from Obama is a complete about-face, the shelving of his flawed economic philosophy and a reversal of his counterproductive policy prescriptions.
In spite of Paul Ryan’s demurral we have some more background from Stephen Hayes on the possible Paul Ryan entrance to the 2012 race.
For months the Republican presidential campaign has been a sleepy affair. The biggest news was that one supposedly top candidate had refused to criticize the frontrunner. Riveting.
The last week changed all of that. Michele Bachmann, once regarded as a sideshow candidate, won the Iowa straw poll, narrowly beating Ron Paul, still regarded as a sideshow candidate. Then would-be contender Tim Pawlenty dropped out. And whatever momentum Bachmann might have gained was halted by the announcement of Texas governor Rick Perry, who not only emerged as a first-tier candidate but is leading in at least one national poll.
Images from the campaign suddenly dominated television newscasts. Perry demonstrated his considerable skills in retail politics. Frontrunner Mitt Romney, whose team had anticipated just such a conservative surge, kept his attention on Barack Obama, whose own campaign swing through the all-important Midwest was all politics, despite the laughable claims of the White House to the contrary.
But some of the most interesting developments last week took place away from the cameras in the solitude of the Rocky Mountains, where Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan consulted with friends and family about whether he should join the race. Ryan has been quietly looking at a bid for nearly three months, since Indiana governor Mitch Daniels called him to say he wasn’t running. But that consideration took a serious turn over the past two weeks, following a phone call with New Jersey governor Chris Christie in early August.
Ryan and Christie spoke for nearly an hour about the presidential race, according to four sources briefed on the conversation. The two men shared a central concern: The Republican field is not addressing the debt crisis with anything beyond platitudes.
Ryan, on the other hand, is the author of the detailed “Path to Prosperity” budget that passed the House last spring. His plan proposes structural reform to ensure the long-term viability of Medicare and other entitlements. …
Every Friday, Jennifer Rubin asks her readers to respond to her Friday Question. Last week she asked who else they wanted to enter the race. The answers favored Ryan.
… The most frequently named candidate, however, was Ryan. Two commenters gave the best case for his candidacy. Zoltan Newberry writes:
“Somebody has to be the second president elected from the House. Ryan is the perfect 0bama foil. He is patient and kind while Obama is brittle and testy. He is utterly genuine while Obama is phony. Ryan is the boy next door, the guy you can count on. People respond warmly to him. Paul Ryan is low-key and likable while the current WH occupant is high-strung, high-maintenance and extremely arrogant. Ryan has great intellectual credentials and has always been an authentic conservative thinker. His relative youth would contrast nicely with our hapless president’s tired, old act. I think Ryan could get out there and impress voters as a modern version of Abraham Lincoln, and, God knows, we really need a person like that, somebody who is authentic, somebody who is the real deal.”
The StatistQuo adds:
“He is the future. All but four House Republicans are on record in support of Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” No Republican presidential candidate has a pro -growth, tax reform, budget reform, assertive foreign policy agenda, who though he is a social conservative does not wear his social conservatism on his sleeve. He showed poise and adroitness in the post-“Path to Prosperity” town meetings in Wisconsin.
He has already bested Obama in the impromptu Obamacare debate in Baltimore and would be unfazed sharing a debate stage with Obama. He will be welcome by both Beltway AND Tea Party Republicans. He has the intellectual heft to confidently defend his and his party’s positions. And being young, Ryan defies the stereotype of Republican leaders like Reagan, Dole, McCain, who were a tad long in the tooth when they were nominated. I believe, throwing granny off the cliff notwithstanding, Paul Ryan is Barack Obama’s worst nightmare.” …
Jeff Jacoby devotes two columns to Perry’s pledge to make Washington, DC inconsequential in our lives.
WHEN TEXAS Governor Rick Perry announced his campaign for president last weekend in a speech to the RedState Gathering in Charleston, S.C., he saved his best line for the end. “I’ll promise you this,’’ he said to exuberant cheers and applause, “I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your life as I can.’’
To a Democrat steeped in the big-government tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society, there could hardly be a greater heresy.
For liberals, perhaps the only thing more absurd and disagreeable than the prospect of a Washington with radically reduced influence in American life is a presidential candidate pledging to make that reduction a priority. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and aide to Tip O’Neill, characterized Perry’s applause line as nothing less than a call for anarchy. The governor is saying “not just that the era of big government is over,’’ Matthews hyperbolically told his “Hardball’’ viewers on Monday, “he’s saying the era of government is over. . .. Let’s get rid of the government, basically.’’
But to countless libertarians and free-market conservatives, it is exhilarating to hear a candidate talk this way. And why wouldn’t it be? After all, large majorities of Americans consistently say they don’t trust the federal government and have little faith in the ability of Washington’s immense bureaucracy to solve the nation’s problems. In promising to curb Washington’s outsize authority, Perry is responding to an alienation from government that is very much a Main Street phenomenon. …
Jacoby expands on distrust of DC in the second column.
… it isn’t highways or veterans’ programs or minority voting rights that conservatives find so objectionable about Washington. When Perry speaks of making the nation’s capital “inconsequential,’’ he isn’t proposing to dismantle the Hoover Dam. Hard as it may be for liberals to accept, the Republican base isn’t motivated by blind loathing of the federal government, or by a nihilistic urge to wipe out the good that Washington has accomplished.
What conservatives believe, rather, is what America’s Founders believed: that government is best which governs least, and that human freedom and dignity are likeliest to thrive not when power is centralized and remote, but when it is diffuse, local, and modest.
“It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected,’’ wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821. In part that is because central planners and regulators rarely know enough to be sure of the impact their decisions will have on the innumerable individuals, communities, and enterprises affected by them. “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap,’’ Jefferson dryly remarked, “we should soon want bread.’’ The Beltway blunders of our own era – from the subprime mortgage meltdown to Cash for Clunkers to minimum wage laws that drive up unemployment – would not have surprised him. …
Andrew Malcolm finds an interesting pic of the first couple.
… Sunday morning the Secret Service packed all the Obamas in secure cars and headed for a private ocean beach.
Reuters’ sharp-eyed Kevin Lamarque snapped this revealing photo of the first couple in the car tuned out from each other during this quality time family foray.
Of course, Michelle Obama could have her iPod crammed with hubby’s recent speeches.